The nurturing one

A God beyond human gender can still be imagined in terms of gendered humans, without any rejection of tradition, as long as those images or metaphors are not reified. As such, the nursing God is as valid as any other biblical image, and it has the potential for great good. As Davina Haskell observed, it “construct[s] an emotionally positive relationship of nurture and reliance between God and human beings” and “establishes an intimate, familial bond between divinity and humanity, redefining the relationship between the two in terms of tenderness, rather than dominion.” As the Bible testifies, this is part of God’s identity.

Efforts to discourage and stamp out goddess worship are at best useless, and at worst harmful. Christians who attempt this are already conformed to the patriarchy of this world, and they can be transformed, as Paul said, only by the renewing of their own minds. The battle that has long been waged outward against the culture must be turned inward if it is to succeed—turned toward the long self-inquiry and self-analysis required to root out the ways in which the church continues to push people away from the God of the Bible, who offers his nurturing breast to all. The resources of the tradition are rich in this area. Using feminine language and imagery for God in worship is a starting point that can create fruitful discomfort and invite worshipers to ask hard questions about God and gender that lead to good conversations.—Christopher B. Hays in Divine Doppelgängers: YHWH’s Ancient Look-Alikes, 218

Beyond gender

As long as the dominant Christian church is patriarchal and misogynistic, women in particular (though also some men) will look at it and know innately that is not the true church, and that it cannot meet the needs with which their Creator created them. Only a church that recognizes and worships a God who is beyond human male and female identity is the true and fulfilling church. But we cannot avoid gendered imagery, so we must instead embrace it in all its forms, feminine as well as masculine.—Christopher B. Hays in Divine Doppelgängers: YHWH’s Ancient Look-Alikes, 218

The problem of metaphors

That is not, however, the end of the matter, because the notion that the God of the Bible is masculine rather than feminine is false. Despite the overwhelmingly masculine language used for God in the Bible, to extract the notion that God is male is an example of the error of the via eminentiae: the idea that God is like something else, only more so. In this case: God is like a king, only much more powerful; God is like a father, but a better father than any human. It is necessary, albeit difficult, simultaneously to affirm the metaphors as metaphors and to admit that they fall so far short of divine reality that they threaten to lead us astray in crucial ways.—Christopher B. Hays in Divine Doppelgängers: YHWH’s Ancient Look-Alikes, 217–18 (emphasis original)

Keep making those cakes!

As long as a church is patriarchal, or indeed outright misogynistic, as long as it is a means for men to worship and reinforce their own power, which is often what it has been throughout history, then people will always feel a need for a goddess. If Christians are going to worship our own likenesses, then femininity is, after all, not less worthy of adoration than masculinity. As long as God the Father reinforces patriarchy, it is entirely natural that many will want to make cakes for the Queen of Heaven.—Christopher B. Hays in Divine Doppelgängers: YHWH’s Ancient Look-Alikes, 217

Augustine and the dea nutrix

At the roots of monotheism, then, there began a kind of theological dance in the tension between the desire to preserve female imagery for God, including the dea nutrix, and the denial that this is possible for a single deity who was more commonly imagined as male. This would go on through the ages. Even individual theologians were often of two minds. For example, the same Augustine who spoke of “the Lord’s breast” elsewhere declared that, in “the image of God,. . . there is no sex,” and that the woman is not the image of God except when she is joined together with her husband.—Christopher B. Hays in Divine Doppelgängers: YHWH’s Ancient Look-Alikes, 212

<idle musing>
Augustine was wrong! I suspect that the reason he went the route of women not being fully the image of God, aside from his patriarchal frame of reference, was that the church is the bride of Christ, and apart from Christ can't reflect the glory of God. But those two don't have to be, in fact, shouldn't be, tied together.

The problem with Augustine is that he wrote so much that you can find pretty much anything you want in there. Unfortunately, it seems his worst stuff is what the church adopted! But that is just an
</idle musing>

Filling the void

The polemic against dea nutrix imagery for God is deeply connected with the process by which Israelite religion came to focus on a single deity for whom masculine pronouns were most commonly used. The attempted exclusion of goddess worship, particularly that of Asherah (e.g., 2 Kgs 23:4–7),34 left a psychological void for Yahwistic worshipers that continued to be filled in various ways. Monotheism was a revolutionary idea—or to put it a different way, an irregular one. It is not surprising that it was resisted; consider the backlash against the religious innovations of Akhenaten or Nabonidus. Rather, it is surprising that it endured.—Christopher B. Hays in Divine Doppelgängers: YHWH’s Ancient Look-Alikes, 210

The nourishing God

Blending the imagery of flowing milk into that of flowing water, the passage goes on to promise that the wealth of nations will be “like an overflowing stream,” inverting the negative imagery of floods as a violent threat in, for example, [Isaiah] 30:28; 28:2, 15–18; and 10:22. God then says: “As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you; you shall be comforted in Jerusalem” (66:13). So this passage distances YHWH from breastfeeding imagery both through the use of simile and by projecting the divine nursing onto Jerusalem/Zion as a proxy. Nevertheless, it is difficult to ignore the effort to connect God with dea nutrix imagery. —Christopher B. Hays in Divine Doppelgängers: YHWH’s Ancient Look-Alikes, 207

El Shaddai as mother?

Significantly, one of the major theological perspectives that makes up the HB did understand Shadday as related to childbearing. David Biale points out that “all of the passages using El Shaddai in Genesis, with one exception, are fertility blessings.” Thus he argues that an early Israelite tradition “understood El Shaddai as a fertility god.” He demonstrated the point through a survey of passages from Genesis in which Shadday occurs (17:1–2; 28:3; 35:11; 48:3–4), all of which are blessings to be fruitful and multiply.—Christopher B. Hays in Divine Doppelgängers: YHWH’s Ancient Look-Alikes, 204

He's there, hiding in plain sight

Yet a fuller recognition of chance as a divine look-alike for YHWH in ancient Israel serves to highlight the strong account of providence evident throughout the biblical witnesses. The HB is drenched in a providential understanding of God’s activity within the world. At the same time, it offers what might be termed a realistic understanding of how divine providence works. Sometimes there are indeed miracles: God is not restricted by the world’s standard operating system. However, God often chooses to act more locally, more incrementally, and more indirectly, working through human agents, social institutions, inherited customs, and ordinary circumstances. This hidden quality of YHWH’s work had the effect of compelling an interpretation of current events on the part of YHWH’s Israelite worshipers, a pressure that is now actually preserved even in the literary style of biblical poetics. The Bible is written so as to pose the character of God’s action as a question to its readers. Even a random arrow may kill a disguised king and thereby fulfill God’s sure prophetic word (1 Kgs 22:34, 38; cf. 21:19). So too, God’s express will may occur in the form of an accident.—Stephen B. Chapman in Divine Doppelgängers: YHWH’s Ancient Look-Alikes, 197

Hiding in plain sight

In style as well as content, the biblical literature invokes a God who is relentlessly present but whose actions are characteristically disguised, with the result that the arena of human experience is full of beckoning coincidences: “Truly you are a God who hides yourself, O God of Israel, the Savior” (Isa 45:15).—Stephen B. Chapman in Divine Doppelgängers: YHWH’s Ancient Look-Alikes, 196

Is it chance? Or is it God? Or can it be both?

What the chapter [1 Sam 9, Saul and the lost donkeys] evidently means to thematize is not simply a high view of providence but also the contrast between how providence works and how it appears when it does. The chapter’s theological purpose is no doubt to provide reassurance to the implied reader that God is in control despite how things seem, but this reassurance is not given in such a way as to sweep aside as misinformed or ignorant the admittedly real difficulty of spotting God in action. Religious faith, the chapter is saying, can embrace the epistemological deficits of human experience. Indeed, those deficits are themselves marks of true faith and genuine faith experience. This insight will be pressed even further in the wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible (whether to the breaking point or past the breaking point is debated), and so more references to miqreh cluster in Ecclesiastes than in any other biblical book. Ecclesiastes is thus not the first biblical book to recognize the tension between the objective and subjective aspects of divine providence, but it might be the first one to pull them apart by questioning the objective reality of providence from the subjective perspective of its human participants.—Stephen B. Chapman in Divine Doppelgängers: YHWH’s Ancient Look-Alikes, 195

Deterministic?

miqreh can be employed for both “fortune” and “misfortune,” which offers a vantage point for understanding one of the HB’s most profound and challenging theological claims: God may also work through misfortune. This theme is particularly prominent in the Joseph narrative and elsewhere in the book of Genesis. Thus Joseph can tell his brothers: “At last you see that you did not send me, God did, and he has placed me as a father to Pharaoh, as lord of all his house, and ruler over all the land of Egypt” (Gen 45:8). And again: “While you intended harm for me, God intended it for good, in order to bring about this day, to bring life to many people” (Gen 50:20). To style this perspective “deterministic” would be to the miss the point. The thrust of this aspect of the biblical tradition is not that God determines every outcome in advance or that everything that happens is for the best. The point is rather that God is continuously, redemptively working to bring goodness out of misfortune and calamity (cf. Rom 8:28).—Stephen B. Chapman in Divine Doppelgängers: YHWH’s Ancient Look-Alikes, 194

God and chance

But here too YHWH is shown to operate in a fashion that is not altogether different from the ways of chance. There is first the matter of the suppertime test: Why can David and Jonathan not just ask YHWH whether Saul is dangerous? Why construct an elaborate randomizer based on what might or might not happen at the meal? Then there is the follow-up procedure introduced by Jonathan to contact David and inform him that the coast is clear once the meal is over: Jonathan will shoot three arrows in a field and employ coded phrases when he calls out for his servant to retrieve them (1 Sam 20:17–22). Not only was this type of activity with arrows a standard form of divination in the ancient world (belomancy), it is “theologized” in this biblical narrative as indicative of YHWH’s will (v. 22: “Then leave, for yhwh has sent you away”; my emphasis). Once more YHWH is depicted as similar to chance while simultaneously being differentiated from it.—Stephen B. Chapman in Divine Doppelgängers: YHWH’s Ancient Look-Alikes, 192

How free are the gods?

Like Kaufmann, Lawson views fate as having a prior authority over divinities, even as he explores how acquiring possession of the mythic ṭuppi šīmāti (“tablet of destinies”) may bestow upon one god a limited power over other deities and a degree of flexibility over against fate. Lawson adds:

The real source of power in the cosmos comes from the primal, meta- divine realm. The gods and their individual of offices may give form and direction to this power but they are not the final masters over the cosmos or even their own fate. [Lawson, Concept of Fate in Ancient Mesopotamia, 39]

The point can also be expressed by saying that, while the gods are subject to fate, they exercise a degree of agency. On the human plane—the “downstairs” level to the gods’ “upstairs” habitat—the fixed character of destiny was that much stronger and the degree of agency even smaller, to judge from omen texts and the logic of divination. The only exception seems to lie in the notion of prayer. For mortals, prayer could sometimes alter destiny.—Stephen B. Chapman in Divine Doppelgängers: YHWH’s Ancient Look-Alikes, 188

A power higher than the gods!

In a polytheistic worldview, deities are not all-powerful or unconditionally immortal. They are subject to nature and fate. The divine forces of nature and fate are themselves typically imagined as old, primordial (e.g., pre-Olympian) gods that already existed prior to the currently reigning pantheon. “Monotheism” is then not so much about reducing divine actors to a single deity, but rather repositioning deity to hold an authority beyond nature and fate. The determining aspect of monotheism in this account can be expressed as “transcendence”—Stephen B. Chapman in Divine Doppelgängers: YHWH’s Ancient Look-Alikes, 186

The power behind the powers

What is particularly interesting about the notion of destiny or fate is that it was understood to affect deities as well as humans. Drawing on the distinctive approach of Yehezkel Kaufmann, Benjamin Sommer stresses how deities other than YHWH were conceived as being created or born from something that preceded them, and how they remain “subject to matter and to forces stronger than themselves.” He continues:

In Mesopotamian religion, there exists a realm of power independent of, and greater than, the realm of divinity. It is for this reason that in some Mesopotamian texts, humans attempt to ward off evil without turning in any significant way to the gods.. . . The role of the gods, when they are mentioned in texts of this kind, is merely to aid the humans in accessing those powers, which transcend even the gods’ realms but are better understood by the gods than by humans. [Benjamin Sommer, “Monotheism,” 259]

One of the most powerful of these forces is fate, which the gods themselves cannot merely overturn or negate. Indeed, the contrast between polytheism and monotheism may finally be less about the number of deities within a particular worldview and more about the relationship between deity and the divine forces of nature and fate. Monotheism thus entails what Peter Machinist has termed “a restructuring of the comic order.” [Peter Machinist, “How Gods Die,” 235]—Stephen B. Chapman in Divine Doppelgängers: YHWH’s Ancient Look-Alikes, 185–86

More rhetoric

Gods who are spiritual, creative, loyal to their worshippers, intent on punishing wickedness and rewarding goodness, insistent upon the establishment of justice and equity and upon the prevention of the victimization of the weak—these gods stand too close to YHWH to allow the unqualified choice for him and against them which the covenantal monotheism of ancient Israel requires. In contrast, a piece of inert matter shaped by human hands into a cult object poses no threat; it is only ridiculous. A prime objective of interreligious polemics is to make the competitor look exactly so—ridiculous.—Jon D. Levenson in Divine Doppelgängers: YHWH’s Ancient Look-Alikes, 172

The rule of faith

I would argue that the dynamic that seems clear enough in the regula dei, even if still somewhat fuzzy, was operative long before the second-century church fathers. This same feedback loop, dynamic “arc of understanding,” and reverberation between faith, practice, and authoritative locus (underwritten by the experience of faith and of its practice) is evident, for example, in 1–2 Maccabees, though of course not only there. Still, this example is useful, since it demonstrates that the kind of regula dei dynamic I am suggesting actually was operational in later stages of Second Temple Judaism.—Brent A. Strawn in Divine Doppelgängers: YHWH’s Ancient Look-Alikes, 155

Arrogance!

A crucial theological issue, quite apart from those important matters, is to somehow prevent an unhelpful and overly historicized “developmentalism.” “Development” is, let it be underscored once more, something of a magic word—not only because it is hard to determine cause and effect in sciences outside the natural ones (and even there, it is not always easy), but also because development often connotes a kind of upward trajectory, a myth of progress. In such instances “developmentalism” is at root little more than a kind of dressed-up dispensationalism, the ramifications and outcomes of which I wish to strenuously avoid, not only because they so often reek of supersessionism, but also because they are inherently and conceptually unable to mark an end to the development in question, which is to say, they are unable to justify why the current, always-superior moment in time will not be surpassed by the next development, stage, or “dispensation.” The whole thing smacks of arrogance, if nothing else, but also arbitrariness: one must simply draw a line in the sand somewhere when it comes to development, a line that, again, does not seem theoretically justifiable, even if in some cases it is theologically understandable.—Brent A. Strawn in Divine Doppelgängers: YHWH’s Ancient Look-Alikes, 154

The rule of faith (continued)

What one sees in the rule of faith, therefore, is something of a feedback loop, what Wilken calls a reverberation of sorts and an “arc of understanding.” A community of faith, because of the faith that emerges from its experience of the divine (even if that experience, at its most direct, lies in the distant past, preserved in sacred literature), now engages in practices of faith whereby it re(de)fines both faith and practice through the course of time and in close conjunction with its central locus of revelation: in this case, its authoritative religious texts.—Brent A. Strawn in Divine Doppelgängers: YHWH’s Ancient Look-Alikes, 154